Saturday, March 24, 2012

Well, thanks to the vagaries of movie availability, tonight I'll either be watching The Iron Lady, or Hannibal. Yup, it's a choice between a chick-flick, or a movie about a steely-eyed, cold-blooded mass-murderer (played by Meryl Streep).

Here's the trailer for the psychopath movie:

I really can't bloody stand Meryl Streep, but apparently she does a good Maggie impersonation, so maybe I'll be able to suffer through it. In addition, I just noticed in this trailer the voice of Anthony Stewart Head, who played Giles on Buffy TVS... that'll be nice, to see him in a movie.

And, after all, at least in this movie she gets to kick the shit out of those swarthy bloody Argentinians, defending the British empire from invasion by foreign scum. So I can cheer for her when it gets to the Falklands War.

But, like all things Ayn Rand, it still gets even better than this... because there's also an Ayn Rand documentary that came out last year, titled "Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged"! Here's the trailer for that:

Hooray! We can haz teh collapse of American civilization!

* - I really want you to go read the Ebert review. So here's an excerpt:

"The movie is constructed of a few kinds of scenes: (1) People sipping their drinks in clubby surroundings and exchanging dialogue that sounds like corporate lingo; (2) railroads, and lots of ’em; (3) limousines driving through cities in ruin and arriving at ornate buildings; (4) city skylines; (5) the beauties of Colorado. There is also a love scene, which is shown not merely from the waist up but from the ears up. The man keeps his shirt on. This may be disappointing for libertarians, who I believe enjoy rumpy-pumpy as much as anyone."**

** - I don't think Ebert completely understands the full nuance of the term "rumpy-pumpy".

PS there also was a search of my blog a few days ago for "Louis 'Lobito' James". I've never called him 'Lobito" (what does that even mean? 'The habit'?) and probably have never even mentioned the guy, and have no clue who he is; though apparently he's got something to do with Casey, who is regularly prodded with a stick on IKN. Probably cos Otto's jealous at Casey's having picked great stocks like Fortuna Silver and Bellhaven, cough cough.

PPS speaking of which, I did a Google Maps search for "Galt's Gulch", and all i came up with was (a) a grassy lane in Florida that went to nowhere, and (b) this:

Frankly I don't like the architecture. Then again, what can you expect when the statist/socialist/communist masses oppress the great creators and thinkers of the world with their taxes and their totalitarian police-state? The only rational result is for the great architects to leave the USA, in favour of a country that will respect great architecture like... um... I dunno, Italy or something.

So all the great architects flee the socialist USA, and you're left with... I dunno, what is this? Faux adobe pre-fab? What mediocre proletarian trash. Obviously the oppressor masses have spoken, here. God, I could go on about this in a 10,000-word rant posted on talk.politics.libertarian, referencing Ludwig von Mises and Max Stirner and everything. With footnotes. That's how angry I am.

So yeah, I'd expect that this particular "Galt's Gulch LLC, Interlaachen Lane, Jacksonville, FL, United States", pictured above, has nothing to do with the Casey crew. Probably just some guy who puts out a newsletter about libertarianism or something.

Good luck to the guy, nice car by the way, shame about the house: but dude, you're in the wrong country. You need to sell that crate, put your money into gold bullion, get that stashed in a vault in Austria, then move to somewhere safe like Argentina.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Cuz, y'know, gold is worthless and nobody would ever want to have some. Like, China or Qatar or nobody. And Eike's dumb to have bought a gold property like Ventana anyway, that's why he's so poor. Oh... wait....

Here's FM, from Nightmusic, doing "Phasors on Stun". This is probably even before their first album, since Nash the Slash doesn't wear a mask yet and the song still is in a fairly primitive form.

In case you're wondering, they toured a lot with Rush, and were blown off the stage all the time. Even more, they got entirely blown off the stage by Saga, who had quite an incredible stage presence in their day. Not FM's fault - one guy is playing a very hard instrument, another guy is tied to 2 keyboards, and the third guy (not here) is behind a big drum kit. You just can't have stage presence with that.

Monday, March 19, 2012

#1, the project I've been working on for the past 6 months has changed from Terry Gilliam's Brazil into... well... Terry Gilliam's Tideland. It's no longer a Kafkaesque nightmare which, though still funny in a sardonic way, still makes you cry at the end; instead it's turned into an utterly bleak thumb-in-the-eye with a little girl whose only friends are dismembered barbie heads, and the corpse of the little girl's dead heroin addict father spends the entire film just sitting there in the living room. Um, played by Jeff Bridges. And all you can do is watch, squirming uncomfortably in your seat, asking yourself "Why? Why does Terry Gilliam hate us so much that he's making us watch a little girl go insane in an empty house with her parents dead and a mentally retarded guy down the road with explosives who wants to molest her?"

#2, the jackbooted socialist-statist thugs at my employer's IT department have blocked all access to blogspot. Apparently, Google has decided to screw with everything by how autoforwarding Canadian blogspot traffic to a new domain, blogspot.ca - but my fascist-communist employer thinks that this is a malicious domain. So, no reading anyone else on blogspot, and no posting to my own blogspot either. I can still reach it from my cellphone, but writing posts is a bitch. I'm too busy because of #1 anyway, so lack of posting will continue until morale improves.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

OK, I'm not in the USA, and I don't pay for premium cable, so I had to get a copy of Game Change the old fashioned way: from certain individuals of a Swedish persuasion.

Verdict? Not a bad movie. I thought Ed Harris was really convincing as John McCain. Julianne Moore, however, had a few mannerisms that put me off believing she was Palin: through about the first half hour of the movie it looked like she had her jaw wired shut. Serious. Her lower jaw didn't move.

Anyway. There was a continuity problem, I suspect. I'm not sure of this, but if Palin really did receive a telephone call at a fair in Alaska on 27 August, I expect the shadows would have been one hell of a lot longer, no matter what time of day it was and where in Alaska it was. I'm not doing the math; I live far enough north that I can guess what fucking shadows look like on 27th August in Alaska. I'm guessing they must have filmed that scene in Colorado. After all, why fly to Alaska to film one 1-minute scene? I'm not anal about continuity, it's just that the shadows made the scene utterly unbelievable to me.

Also, the film tends to confuse the tea-partyist ultra-right Republicanism of today with the fundamentalist Evangelical Republicanism of 2008. McCain probably couldn't have run with Lieberman, sure, but his team didn't select Palin to appease the "conservative wing". Rather, McCain's team wanted to get Focus on the Family to endorse McCain, and the price was being forced to take on Palin as running-mate.

Palin wasn't a tea-partier, they didn't exist back then; she was a member of the Evangelical Christian movement in the Republican party. And, then and now, you can't win an election for the Rs if you don't have 10,000 Christian fundamentalists working for you knocking on doors, manning phones, and taking donations.

Oh, and I doubt anyone in 2008 was seriously considering tagging Jindal to run with McCain. That talk only seemed to start after the election. Sorta like the Republicans thought it'd be nice to have someone brown to run against Obama - just not too brown.

Other than that, good movie. I especially enjoyed the parts where Sarah goes catatonic, weeping like a petulant little sissy baby because they be makin' her larn her histry an' polly-ticks. Fucktards like that deserve to break down and cry.